Education Act 1970 Essay

The Education Act (1944) categorised all children with special educational needs by their disability and labelled them as ‘maladjusted’ or ‘educationally sub-normal’. It established eleven categories of ‘handicap’ and a partial acknowledgement that there may be certain benefits to mainstream schooling. Despite that, it was not until many years later that students with disabilities were accepted as individuals who had the right to a suitable education of their own. Until the 1970s many children with any form of disability ‘were excluded from the full rights of citizenship (Borsay, 2005), were considered ‘uneducable’ and taken away from their homes to spend their lives in institutions. It was not until 1971 that the ‘rights of the disabled child

As a result of this ‘children with impairments most frequently found themselves in special schools, segregated from mainstream education’ (Wall, 2011). These certain choices about the education and placement of disabled children resulted in an ostracized population and society that has been ‘institutionalised, segregated, uneducated, socially rejected, physically excluded and made unemployed’ (Oliver, 1996, Carrington, 1999, Vlachou, 1997). This segregation of children with impairments was highly criticised, and it was argued than ‘any form of segregation on the basis of disability of learning difficulties is morally wrong’ (Lindsay, 2003), and integrating children with disabilities into mainstream schools was seen as the best move to make to end the segregation, gaining equal opportunities and the right to an education for all. Erving Goffman (1968) questioned the assumption that the separation, of part of the public into segregated institutions, was actually a good thing and pointed out that these types of institutions present themselves ‘as the rational and humane solution to peoples difficulties, but they in fact operate merely as society’s ‘storage